Murders, and Southerners, and Magic

oh, my!  The Thomistic master McInerny on Catholic writing.  Excerpts:

...When Dante dedicated the Paradiso to Can Grande della Scala, he said that the literal meaning of the Divine Comedy is the way in which human beings by their own free acts earn eternal punishment or reward. That is the vision of human action that makes fiction Catholic. It is not a matter of having priests and nuns on the set, not a matter of explicit reference to Catholic things, but rather the Dantesque vision. There are priests and nuns in stories that lack this vision; this vision is present where there is nothing peculiarly Catholic in view...

Just as natural law is included in Christian revelation, so there is a natural moral vision of human action operating in fiction that is not Catholic in the sense mentioned above. Alas, we live in a time when natural morality is thought to be religious, doubtless because the Church seems the major champion and defender of the natural law. The recognition that adultery and deviance and killing people is wrong is often thought to be the quirky outlook of Christians. But of course great pagan literature also proceeds from this recognition.

Embarrassment about the notion of the Catholic writer is like embarrassment at the notion of Catholic universities. The faith is seen as an embarrassment and an impediment. Both attitudes founder on the same fact. Universities were born ex corde ecclesiae, out of the heart of the Church, and so was our literature. Being a Catholic writer is not a falling away from an ideal; it is the way to fulfill the ideal completely -- to see human acts in terms of the ultimate stakes of life.

And to engage and amuse the reader in doing so.

He mentions a number of Catholic writers in there, for anyone looking for book recommendations.  The title of the post is meant to refer to Chesterton's Father Brown and Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Whimsy, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy's work, and Tolkien.